Alternatives
Products that do what Whispering does
Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
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I built Whispering because I believe transcription is too fundamental a tool to be locked behind paywalls. It's a cross-platform desktop and web transcription app that turns speech into text with a keyboard shortcut, among other things. The app lets you bring your own API key (OpenAI, Groq, etc.) and make direct calls. If you want complete privacy, it also supports local transcription. Either way, your audio never goes through any middleman servers. It's super lightweight (~22MB), built with Svelte 5 and Tauri, and works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. I've been using it daily for the past few…
2025 · github.com
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I built Open WhisperScribe after struggling with the complexity, paywalls, or limitations of most speech-to-text tools for macOS and elsewhere. My main requirements were: Simple, <5-min setup Runs fully offline, locally (no data leaves your machine) Works seamlessly in any app — just press a hotkey, speak, and your words appear where your cursor is (code editors, terminal, you name it) Fast and distraction-free It uses OpenAI’s Whisper model under the hood, but wraps it in a lightweight CLI tool that sits quietly in the background. The project is open source (Apache 2.0). Setup is a single…
2025 · github.com
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Hello all, I made a small transcription app for your Mac based on OpenAI’s Whisper. Would love some feedback. My plan is to make it easy to load weights from any fine-tuned whisper model to enable specialized dictation for any subfield. It’s still early in development. Thanks!
2023 · twitter.com
- 24WA
Hi HN, I wanted to share my first open-source project with you all: WhisperCat . WhisperCat is a small desktop application for recording audio and transcribing it using OpenAI's Whisper API. I built this because I needed something simple and reliable for my own transcription workflows, and now I'm hoping it might be useful to others as well. It's still pretty early stage, but it works well for basic audio recording and transcription tasks. What It Does: Lets you record audio with your preferred microphone. Transcribes audio files automatically via Whisper (OpenAI's transcription API).…
2025 · github.com
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